CBS This Morning

Broke Rome leans on luxury brands to preserve heritage

ROME -- The new mayor of Rome announced this week that the city would no longer
bid to host the 2024 Olympics. It was too much of an expense, the mayor said,
for the heavily indebted city. But, that’s not the only bill the city is
worrying about.

CBS News correspondent Seth
Doane reports the famed Spanish Steps are re-opening Thursday after being
closed for a nearly year-long renovation. But it wasn’t the city paying for it,
but a Roman company; the jewellery house Bulgari.

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Saving Italy's history becomes fashionable

Tourists may see spectacular
monuments across Rome, but the cash-strapped Italian capital sees spectacular
expenditures it simply can’t afford. Now, Rome has
drawn up a “wish list” of monuments it wants to see fixed -- in part to
encourage private funding to preserve history.

It was hardly a quick power-wash for the stories
Spanish Steps. CBS News watched earlier this summer as workers painstakingly
scrubbed away years of grime and re-levelled the steps.

“They were really damaged by time and traffic,”
explains Bulgari CEO Jean Christophe Babin. His company -- which has a store
down the street -- spent more than $1.5 million refurbishing the 135 baroque
steps at the heart of this city of 3 million people.

“When you have such a density of art on one
hand, and relatively few people, it’s the mission of the largest companies of
the city… to make sure the city is at its best,” Babin said.

American archaeologist and preservationist Darius Arya,
who offers tours of this ancient European capital, told Doane it’s likely no coincidence
that Bulgari chose to work on something close to one of their stores, and he
adds that the scale of restoration work still waiting to get done is
staggering.

“It gives you an idea of, number one, why
Rome can say, ‘we have more world heritage than any place in the world,’ and on
the other hand, you can understand very clearly that they need help,” Arya
said.

“Largo Argentina,” the scene of Julius Caesar’s
murder, requires $1.5 million in renovation work before it can re-open. The
fenced-off mausoleum of Augustus needs a $10 million dollar fix.

Students on Arya’s college program were
surprised by the state of some monuments.

“It kind of made me wonder what is happening
to these sites and why they are being put on the back burner,” Alexander
King, a University of Pennsylvania student, told CBS News.

That’s where Claudio Parisi Presicce comes in. He’s
Rome’s Superintendent of Cultural Heritage, and he helped draw up the half-a-billion-dollar
“wish list” of 100 monuments to fix. It’s just the beginning.

“In Rome, we have 574
archaeological areas. We have 400 monumental fountains. We have 900 sacred
monuments,” Presicce said.

And the debt-ridden city has
had some success addressing the list by asking corporations, individuals, and even
other countries to subsidize public restoration work; Luxury shoe and accessory
brand Tod’s paid to restore the Coliseum, while Fendi cleaned-up the famed Trevi Fountain.

Doane asked Presicce if the city’s plea for help
restoring its heritage could lead to tacky branding on some of the world’s most
recognizable historical sites.

“You
don’t see any huge, obscene banners on any of these sites,” he said. “So
the state, the city -- they’re very much concerned about preserving the
integrity of these sites, and not to commercialize them.”

Italy tweaked its tax laws to provide a tax
incentive, and Rome is trying to make the case that this is shared cultural
heritage -- so please, share the bill.